USD coach appreciates special life — and wife

It was a harsh awakening to the perils of being a football coach’s wife.

For the first 20 years of her life, Eva Lindsey knew two places as her home: Budapest, Hungary, and Toronto. Then she married Dale Lindsey and it seemed as if a moving truck would always be parked in their driveway.

In the first year of their marriage, the Lindseys moved from Toronto, where Dale coached with the CFL’s Argonauts, to New Orleans, where he was to begin a job with a new United States Football League team, and then in short order to New Jersey, because Dale couldn’t pass up the chance to work for a very rich and idiosyncratic USFL owner named Donald Trump.

At one point, Dale was in Florida at training camp, the furniture was in New Orleans, and Eva was in Kentucky with Dale’s parents and his ex-wife, wondering what the heck she got herself into.

“We get to New York, rent an apartment,” Dale Lindsey recalled, “and then Eva says to me, ‘If you move one more time in the next year I will be back in Toronto and you will never see me again.’ ”

More than 30 years later, it’s a very funny story to both of them. In the course of their marriage, Dale Lindsey has held 15 coaching jobs. He has worked for seven NFL teams and three colleges, including USD, where the 69-year-old Lindsey is in his first year as the assistant head coach and defensive coordinator on Ron Caragher’s staff.

His most cherished season came in 1994, when Lindsey led the Chargers linebackers during their Super Bowl campaign — the highlight in seven years he spent in two stints with the Bolts.

Through it all, Eva was there, a 5-foot-1 Hungarian fireball, sophisticated yet tough, with a memorably thick accent, who did what is required of so many football wives: take care of the family, manage the house, be there for emotional support in good times and bad, and try to make your own life meaningful while your husband’s passion is expended on a game.

The Lindseys finally found a place to call home, too. Even when they lost everything — Dale’s football memorabilia and Eva’s family heirlooms and paintings — when their house in Rancho Bernardo burned to the ground in the Witch Creek Fire five years ago, they rebuilt in the same spot because they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

“I have a fabulous life,” Eva said.

The former Eva Imre grew up in communist Hungary, the daughter of parents who were part of the intelligentsia, regularly hosting dinner parties for poets and actors and artists. Eva’s father would be ripped from that existence by his service in World War II and four years spent in a Russian prison camp

Dale, 10 years Eva’s senior, was reared in Bowling Green, Ky., where his father co-founded the city’s first sanitation company after toiling as a steelworker. Chuckling at the contrast to Eva’s upbringing, Dale said, “We had the best carpenters, plumbers and iron workers over to my dad’s house.”

Dale played nine seasons in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns and got his first pro coaching job with the Toronto Argonauts.

At the Toronto hotel where the coaches lived, Dale met Eva, a newly divorced mother of two boys. Dale, also divorced, with three children back home in Kentucky, was smitten immediately, and their romance flourished. They married in 1983 so Eva could settle in the United States.

It was an enormous adjustment, moving so much in those initial years, a foreign woman in a strange land. She didn’t even like football at first, thinking of it as “total mayhem.”

In a seven-year span, they went to Green Bay, Southern Methodist University, New England, and Tampa Bay. Eva treated it like her own “game,” making friends and finding various jobs that challenged her. She was not going to sit home, pining for her husband’s attention.

“I call it going from paradise to prison camp, emotionally,” Eva said of the arrival of training camp each summer. “One day the person is there and the next they’re gone. It’s like you get dropped off the universe. It’s essential for a wife to have her own things in life.”

The moves were most difficult for Eva’s youngest son, Derek, who attended four different high schools in Boston, Toronto, Tampa Bay and finally San Diego. Derek graduated from Rancho Bernardo High in 1994 and is now in Budapest overseeing the renovation of Eva’s family home.

Dale’s three children grew up and still live in Bowling Green, and he sometimes does have regrets about not being there more. He said one daughter has five degrees from Western Kentucky and he hasn’t seen any of her graduations.

“The job is all-inclusive,” he said. “God, I hate to say this, but football has always been so important to me. I probably put too much importance on it. I’m guilty of that, and there are a lot of guys who would say the same thing.”

The watershed move for both was Dale’s hiring by Bobby Ross for the Chargers in 1992. Two years later, the team reached its only Super Bowl, and the Lindseys reveled in the success.

Eva and the other coaches’ wives were doused with beer by angry Pittsburgh fans at the AFC Championship Game, and only a couple of weeks later they rode in the backs of vintage cars in the parade that celebrated the team despite its loss to San Francisco in the Super Bowl.

“I had to put my sunglasses on because I was crying,” Eva said. “It was so beautiful.”

The Lindseys now consider San Diego their permanent home. Since ’96, Dale has coached in three other cities, but Eva has remained here since her husband’s second stint with the Chargers in 2002-03. She has a successful holistic healing practice, and Dale couldn’t blame her for not wanting to go to Las Cruces, N.M., for the past three years while he was the assistant head coach at New Mexico State.

“This place spoiled her,” he said. “It would spoil anybody.”

Eva is enjoying having her husband back at home. She loves the atmosphere at USD games and the camaraderie among the coaching staff. She’s still getting most of the work done at home, but maybe now she’ll have her husband on her arm for some parties. You’ll find him in the corner quietly chatting while she works the room.

“Once people meet her, they don’t forget who she is,” Dale said. “Me, I’m like looking at a wall. But when people meet Eva, they always remember her.”